You don't expect your world to stop as you know it. You don't expect your life to change in one night. You never expect to be the last human on Earth.
When you think of the word "alone", what do you think of? Do you picture a boat floating on a lake? Or a girl sitting on some concrete steps, sobbing her eyes out into her hands? Well if you thought of anything along those lines, you don't know the meaning of being alone. I've learned being alone is when there's no one left. Not one person left on our planet is with you anymore. When you and the world (minus the people) are all you have left. Your family, anyone you ever looked at, saw on the news, called, they're all just, gone.
I woke up 1187 days, 13 hours, and 5 minutes ago, with no one left on the Earth. Not a single human being besides me. If you're thinking "Well how could she know there's no one left?" Well, let me make this more clear for you. The Day I Woke Up (that's what I'm calling the day I woke up the only human being left) is the day I started searching the Earth for any people who were left with me. Let me just tell you something, the world is bigger than everyone thinks (thought).
If you've ever traveled to a different country, you know how hard getting on a plane, or bus, or train is. Hey! I didn't have a jet plane with pilots. Nor did I know how to fly one (I still don't know how to fly a jet plane). Do you know how hard it has been to cross the ocean without a real plane? Near impossible. I've had to learn how to do everything. I'm so lucky I found a place with some helicopters. It was difficult learning how to fly one too. It took months. I had to look through everything ever written about how to fly them and still I crash landed one. It nearly took my leg off. Yet, I survived. This happened months after The Day I Woke Up. Also, I've had to become a pretty handy farmer. Ha, us stuck-up city kids never knew anything of how to farm, except that one time in grade school we took a field trip to a farm.
Alright, so this is how things went down. So, The Day I Woke Up, I went downstairs to eat breakfast, it was a Monday (yet another reason to hate Monday's, I don't hate them as much anymore though). Guess who I found, that's right, definitely not a person. Did that surprise me? Hell yes, of course. Especially since I lived in a house with 9 people. 2 sisters, 4 brothers and my parents. I'm oldest. So I'm downstairs now. It was my last week of my third (and hopefully last) year of law school. My collage was across the street you see, so I'm not a dead beat who lives at home with her parents. So no one's home. I search all the normal places everyone would be. Then I checked the time, making sure I didn't over sleep and everyone isn't all at their daily places yet. Nope, it was 7:07. Then I started calling through the house for people. No one answered. Then I started to laugh and I yelled, "Okay guys, haha, VERY funny. You are all suck great jokesters, but you're not fooling me." I waited. Not a peep. Then I said something similar again. Nothing. That's when I started freaking out and I tore through the house. Every nook and cranny. Nothing. Our cars were still in the driveway. So I went to school, pretending everything was normal, I didn't know what else to do. No cars at school either. I was late too, like 9:28 late. I walk to the front of the building and opened the door, it was locked. Then I walked to the other door. Locked too. "DAMNIT!" I screamed. So I walked home in a panic. While I was walking, I noticed that no cars passed by me. There was a weird eerie feeling too. A bunch of dogs were barking, that kind of muffled indoor barking. Also, there was no city noise, like there had been my entire life before this. When I got home again, I started calling everyone on my contacts list. Every single person I knew. No one answered. That's when I became frantic. I started driving to everyone's house I could think of. Everyone's cars were still there, but not the people. I then started breaking into their homes just to make sure. Then I went to all the stores, the mall, the grocery story, Arby's. No people. Also I didn't see a single person on the streets. No cars, buses or trains. No city bustle. This was a strange thing for New York City. If you've ever been, you know it does not stop. Also, the dates were the same on all the flashing signs as the day before. It was almost like I was living yesterday over again.
The next day was actually basically the same. I tried everything again, but no one to be found. I also tried some crazy things to try and wake myself up, at this point I thought it was a really vivid dream. I tried burning my hand, taking an ice shower. Pretty much the works. My heart hadn't stopped pounding since the morning before. The dogs outside in other people's homes were mostly all silent now, they probably had given up hope their owners were coming to let them outside. I had found some of them and let them out, a few houses had cats too. They followed me around for a time in the streets.
A few days passed, and it really sunk in. I was alone. I then decided I was going to pack up some things I needed and I was going to drive to my aunt and uncles home in Connecticut. The whole drive, not a single car on the highway. By the time I had gotten in their city I knew nothing was different from NYC. The only thing on my mind was finding a person. When I got to their house, I started to look all around their house. It was strange because everything seemed the same, just without them. I walked into their room to find their cell phones by their bed. I looked at my uncles phone, "11 missed calls" It read. I started driving around, to no where in particular. Everywhere I drove. Every town I passed, I searched every building I found. I broke into every place I saw. I felt nothing anyone had ever felt before. I felt like literally the last person left on Earth, and I was. But at that moment, I didn't know that I was. My name's Dawn by the way. I guess I didn't mention that yet.
So, I'm going to skip ahead a little bit, past the break down, past when I got stranded, and the point when I realized I had to start relying on myself. I realized I had to started growing crops, otherwise I wasn't going to be able to have food. That's when I went to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. to look for books on farming and being on your own. Not much really worked now because a) people weren't working the systems anymore. What I mean by that is, no ones electric bills were being paid. Therefore, no one had any electricity left. And b) the gas stations weren't working anymore either. I now had to just hijack people's cars. Once the gas ran out, I found a new car. So, I found out everything I could about living 100% independently and off I went to Oklahoma. I figured it wouldn't get too cold for the crops in the winter and I could grow gardens there and everything I needed. By this time, a month had passed. I had called my parents everyday since The Day I Woke Up. I'd been finding new phones to use whenever the battery went out on the phone before.
Once I got to Oklahoma, I went to work.
